2012-12-28

Keeping Riau’s Palm Oil Industry Strong a Careful Balancing Act

“Back in the 1990s, the future of our village was bleak, but then palm oil came and changed it all,” Firdaus said.

“The economy picked up, people could afford to buy motorcycles and improve their homes.”

Firdaus
is the chief of Dosan village in Riau’s Siak district, one of the
countless communities in the heavily forested Sumatran province whose
fortunes are tied to the controversial crop.

In 2003, the
village began growing oil palm on 3,500 hectares of land. But unlike
many other areas, Dosan has from the outset practiced an
environmentally-sustainable form of oil palm cultivation, Firdaus said.

“We
don’t want the improved conditions to come to an end, so we’ve always
tried to conserve our environment,” he said at a discussion in Jakarta
held by Greenpeace Indonesia and the agriculture group Perkumpulan Elang
(Eagle Society).

“That’s why we have rules on not clearing the
existing forest, so that our kids and grandkids will still be able to
experience the forest for themselves.

“We also require residents
to maintain a 100-meter-wide belt of shade trees, because before we
started growing oil palms the air here was very cool.

“Once we began planting the oil palms, it got hotter and we realized we needed shade trees to restore the cool.”

Perkumpulan
Elang director Riko Kurniawan said more needed to be done to empower
such farmers, given how much of Riau’s oil palm plantations they manage.

“Of the 3.2 million hectares of plantations in the province,
local farmers manage 2.1 million hectares, yet their productivity is
very low,” he said.

“That’s because, firstly, the major palm oil
companies aren’t as supportive of independent farmers as they are of
the farmers they employ. Also, oil palm is a relatively new crop and
many farmers don’t yet fully understand how to cultivate it properly.
Also, the prices are still dictated by the companies.”

He warns
that without efforts to empower the farmers, the development of oil palm
plantations in the province is essentially a “ticking time bomb” for
environmental destruction.

“The rate at which they clear forests
for farmland will be out of control. We need the government to step in
and guide the farmers on how to improve their productivity,” Riko said.

He
added that the government could help by providing the farmers with
access to loans and technology to help boost their productivity.

“Right
now, they’re only harvesting one or two tons per hectare per month,
when they could potentially be making four to seven tons. If they could
intensify their productivity from their existing farmland, then the
forests can be saved.”